I thank all participants for participating in this round table. I will now give the word to Ray Brassier for an intervention called Practices and Processes. Object Naturalism, Subject Naturalism and Process Naturalism. Okay, thanks. First, I'm sorry, but I'm going to speak in English because my French is too clumsy to allow a philosophical presentation. And secondly, I'd like to thank Elie and Emmanuel for organizing this and for inviting me. I'm sorry I couldn't attend the first three days. I wish I could have been able to because it looks like it was a fantastic event.
So I'm going to talk about Wilfred Sellers and I'm going to try to explain, well, there's a, in a way, there is a continuity between this, my current work on Sellers, which I hope will result in a book in about a year or so, and the work, the book I published a decade ago. So my book opens with an account of Sellers' distinction between the manifest and the scientific images of man in the world. And this provided me with, again, the basic framework I wanted in order to formulate the problem of nihilism. After writing the book and reading more of Sellers' work,
I came to realize that of all the philosophers I discussed in the book, he was the one I had, I think, whose work I had least understood or whose work I had skimmed over most superficially. And I realized that understanding the proper nature of his philosophical system forced me to reformulate the questions that I had tried to raise in that book. So this is why I've spent the past several years trying to understand Sellers' work. So I hope this is a kind of justification for what follows. So the paper's got three parts. First, I'm going to give an account of Sellers' transcendental naturalism.
Then I'm going to discuss Robert Brandom's critique of Sellers' naturalism. Brandom is a philosopher who's deeply influenced by Sellers. his whole inferential semantics was sketchily formulated in Sellers' own work. It's given a systematic articulation in Brandom's work. But Brandom rejects Sellers' commitment to naturalism and to scientific naturalism. And finally, I'll close with an account of the... defend Sellers' naturalism against some of Brandom's criticisms, or at least try to, and try to emphasize the importance of the distinction between practices and processes,
between discursive practices and material processes, which I think underlies this whole kind of disagreement between Brandom and Sellers. So, Sellers is a transcendental philosopher, and the transcendental perspective alters the conditions in terms of which the issue of realism is framed. Transcendental philosophy can be contrasted with dogmatic rationalism on the one hand and skeptical empiricism on the other. The dogmatic rationalist assumes that the mind enjoys a priori cognitive access to a mind and independent reality, and believes that reason can deduce the fundamental features of that reality. The skeptical empiricist for her part insists that all knowledge is rooted in but limited
by sensory experience and denies that reason can deliver a priori knowledge of mind independent reality. The transcendental philosopher rejects both dogmatism and skepticism. She rejects the rationalist assumption that the mind enjoys a priori cognitive access to reality just as she rejects the empiricist claim that all knowledge derives from sensory experience. Both dogmatism and empiricist skepticism remain beholden to what Sellers calls the framework of givenness. Now, Sellers is famous for his attack on the myth of the given. But this attack is misunderstood. It's often reduced to a critique of a kind of naive positivistic empiricism.
And this is not the target of Sellers' critique. what he calls the whole framework of givenness applies both to certain kinds of rationalist metaphysics and to, so I would argue, certain kind of strains of Husserlian and post-Husserlian phenomenology. So if he rejects the framework of givenness, it's because dogmatism takes the correlation between thinking and being as given and skepticism takes the intelligibility of sensory experience as given. At the heart of the framework of givenness is the assumption common to empiricism and rationalism that mental states are self-intimating. And to reject this framework is to refuse
the assumption that the mental is self-intimating. This means that minds do not necessarily know themselves. There is a fundamental difference between thinking and knowing what one is thinking of. By the same token there's a fundamental difference between sensing and knowing what is sensed. The awareness of something is not the awareness of something as something. And this difference between thinking and thought or sensing and sense follows from the rejection of the framework of givenness. I think it is the transcendental difference for Sellers. He He recasted the transcendental difference as obtaining between thinking and thought or sensing and sense. The core feature of the framework of givenness is the premise that the fusion of thinking and thought or of sensing and sense is guaranteed,
either by intellectual intuition in the case of rationalism or sensory intuition in the case of empiricism. But this intuitive identity, whether intellectual or sensory, immediately generates metaphysical divisions such as between mind and nature, experience and theory, immediacy and mediation, etc. The rejection of this fusion raises the spectre of representation. Since thinking stands to thought and sensing stands to sensed, as representing stands to represented. And notwithstanding all the critiques of representation in 20th century philosophers, specifically those of Heidegger and Deleuze, I think Sellers' account of representation circumvents both those critiques.
This is not a Cartesian conception of representation. It's a radicalized Kantian account. The transcendental question then becomes, what is the nature of the connection between thinking and thought or sensing and sense? More generally, how are we to understand the connection between representing and represented? The problem of representation arises from the rejection of metaphysical fusion, whether of thinking and thought or sensing and sense. But it is not the problem of the division of substance, the one and the many, or of the connection between divided substances, whether thinking or extended, animate or inanimate. The problem of representation is not the problem of how a thinking substance can somehow, you know, obtain, reach out into extended substance and retrieve a representation of an object or some features or characteristics of extended substances.
It is the problem, the problem of representation is the problem of the transcendental torsion between the represented inside and the representing outside. It's a problem of transcendental exteriority. And this torsion is the focus of what Sellers calls transcendental logic, which precisely suspends the metaphysical reification of the difference between mind and nature. Here's a quote from Sellers' 1966 paper, Some Remarks on Kant's The Year of Experience. The task of transcendental logic is to explicate the concept of a mind that gains knowledge of the world of which it is a part. The acquisition of knowledge by such a mind involves its being acted on or affected by the objects it knows.
Rejecting the framework of givenness means relinquishing the assumption of a resemblance between the categories of thought, the structure of representing and the order of nature. Our understanding of nature is discursive, not intuitive. This is Seller's Cantinism. In other words, because it's discursive, it represents nature. But this representation of nature, minimally defined as a spatio-temporal continuum, and I know that there's a whole problem about how successfully one can avoid smuggling in metaphysical assumptions into any kind of characterization of nature. But nevertheless, let's try and stick to a kind of a minimal definition of the spatiotemporal continuum.
It's conditioned by the way nature appears to us both spatially and temporally. And since what is empirical is coextensive with spatiotemporal appearance, nature is cognizable to the extent that it is empirically representable. But, says Sellers, not every system of empirical representables constitutes nature, but only that system of empirical representables, the representings of which would be true. Transcendental logic then aims to uncover both what it is for something to be an empirical representable and what it is for something to be a true representing. Understanding the former involves grasping the way in which thinking interacts with sensing,
while understanding the latter requires grasping the nature of the connection between truths pertaining to what is conceptually represented and truth pertaining to non-conceptual representing. We need this distinction between truth at the level of the represented and truth at the level of representing. No single account of truth can, you know, the mistake is to kind of focus on one at the expense of the other. So this distinction between representing and represented is not the difference between two separate things but the formal distinction between let's say act and content. And this yields the distinction between objective reality, reality imminent to the represented, and what can
be called reality in itself, i.e. non-represented reality. But non-represented does not mean non-representable. The distinction between objective or or represented reality and non-represented reality, or reality in itself, is epistemological and not ontological. So this distinction between represented and non-represented, or between what is for us and in itself, is contained within the eminent distinction between representing and represented. And the relation of analytical dependence between represented and representing renders the objective reality of the represented content conditional upon the formal reality of the representing act.
Here Sellers is basically drawing on what he thinks is the scholastic distinction which underwrites Kant's distinction between appearance and in itself. In other words, the objective reality is reality as the correlate of some kind of mental act, Whereas a formal reality is substantial reality. It's independent. It's the reality that substantial form has. Since every represented implies a representing, the objective reality of a represented entails the formal reality of the representing through which it is represented. Now, this argument establishes only that if there are representatives, then there must
be representings in themselves. Not that there actually are such representings in themselves or that we can know either them or non-representings in themselves, because they're also non-representing in themselves. Transcendental skepticism insists on the possibility of a complete disconnection between represented contents and the in itself, whether construed in terms of representings or non-representings. And Sellers now I think has two arguments, I'm summarizing, but I think he has two basic arguments against transcendental skepticism. First, we can question the truth of some of our beliefs or we can question the kind of the adequacy of some representatives
by holding others to be true, but we cannot question the truth of all our beliefs at once. What cannot be represented is the falsity of every representative. This is Sellers's, In other words, Seller's most powerful argument against a kind of radical skepticism is that it has to appeal to a version of the myth of the given where you can somehow imagine the possibility of appearances. you can imagine the intelligibility of appearances that have no objective correlates. For sellers, this supposedly appealed to a fundamental stratum of appearance
uncontaminated by any taking of appearances to be thus and so. An account of seeming uncontaminated by any claim that something seems or a represented that is not of something or of something as something. And I think the Szilagyans claim is that no such stratum of appearance is even conceivable. Because the appearing is always the appearing of something. The second strand in his argument against transcendental skepticism is the argument from what Sellers calls double affection. And this is the one I'm going to focus on. And Sellers' proposal is that the transcendental exteriority of things in themselves as grounds of appearances
has an analogue in the empirical exteriority of physical objects as causes of sensations. And here's a quote from Sellers where he proposes to, where he sets out his strategy, which is the analogical reclamation of the in itself. Sellers writes in Science and Metaphysics from 1967 even if we attribute to Kant the view that things in themselves are analogous in structure to the world of appearance the analogy would for him be one which could only be cached by God much as according to traditional theology only he can cache the analogies in terms of which we attempt to conceive him. God would have a non-analogical grasp of things in themselves by virtue of the fact that his intuitive representations are not passive, but are the very volitions by which they are created.
It's precisely God's intellectual intuition creates or generates the objects which it intuits, which is why the distinction between particular and universal doesn't exist for him. him, he can grasp everything in its infinite complexity. But Sellers continues, the thesis I wish to defend but not ascribe to Kant is that although the world we conceptually represent in experience exists only in actual and obtainable representings of it, we can say from a transcendental point of view, not only that existence in itself accounts for this obtainability by virtue of having a certain analogy with the world we represent, but also that in principle, we, rather than God alone,
can provide the cash. For as I see it, the use of analogy in theoretical science, unlike that in theology, generates new determinate concepts. It does not merely indirectly specify certain unknown attributes by an analogy of proportion. One might put this by saying that the conceptual structures of theoretical science give us new ways of schematizing categories. So, we supply the conceptual currency for constructing the analogy between the determinations of appearances and the determinations of the in itself. And this construction is the analogical schematization through which non-representings in themselves can account for the obtainability of conceptual representings.
This obtainability, I think, is the key term for sellers. So how much, how might such schematization proceed? Things in themselves are not the causes of appearances in the sense in which electrostatic discharges are the causes of lightning. And this is not because the category of causation cannot be applied to things in themselves. It can, provided we bear in mind the distinction between pure and schematized categories. The pure or unschematized category of causation is the logical relation of ground and consequence. And as such, it can be applied to the relation between appearances and things in themselves, so long as we are clear that this is a strictly conceptual rather than a cognitive determination.
Thus, we can think things in themselves as the grounds of appearances provided that this grounding relation is understood in terms of a modified analogy with the way in which appearances cause other appearances. And the relevant modification is that whereas a schematized category of causality always involves a consequence relation between temporal events. The grounding relation between things in themselves and appearances involves a consequence relation that operates at the level of transcendental reflection. So, the postulate of the thing in itself is a transcendental and hence purely conceptual analog of the causal relation between material objects and sensations. This is a quote from Kant now.
Even if we cannot cognize these same objects, appearances as things in themselves, we must at least be able to think them as things in themselves. For otherwise they would follow the absurd proposition that there is an appearance without anything that appears. This is the point of Kant's insistence that the distinction between appearances and things in themselves or between phenomena and noumena is precisely not a metaphysical distinction. It's not a two-world metaphysics. He's not dividing the world into sensible objects and intelligible objects. Things in themselves are the same things as appearances, but considered independently of the way in which they affect us. Now Sellers' break with Kant is over the constraint that sensibility exercises over understanding,
and hence the relation that thinking bears to knowing. For Kant, conceptual cognition is constrained by sensible intuition. Concepts without intuitions are empty. They have no cognitive content. We can think but cannot know things in themselves. But Sellers parts company with Kant is that he thinks that Kant conflates the manifold of intuition with the manifold of sense. By distinguishing them, we can conceive of the grounding relation relation between appearances and things in themselves as analogous to the relation between conceptual representatives and non-conceptual representings. Now, so the distinction is going to be, so Sellers is going to say that, Sellers wants
to distinguish between intuition and sensation. And he wants to say that there is, that space and time are conceptually intuited, okay, but so that the understanding, the synthesis of apprehension is already at work in sensibility and it forms the kind of the manifold of sense into this such is, into particular objects of which can then be conceptually characterized in other ways. That's conceptual intuition whereas there's a non-conceptual representing which operates at the level of sensation. So the distinction is between conceptual representing, which is intuitive, which can be intuitive,
and non-conceptual representing, which is not intuitive. So the manifold of sense comprises complexes of representations that are also representations of complexes. But the representing of complexity does not simply mirror the complexity of the representing. For example, a representing of a green square adjoining a red square need not be understood as comprising a representing of a green square, a representing of a red square, and a representing of the relation of a joining. Just as from the expression a cat and a mat, we can form the complex common noun cat on a mat, which occurs in the sentence, this is a cat on a mat. So this is now a particular object, a cat on a mat.
So from any expressions, a kind 1 and a kind 2, we can form the complex common noun, a kind 1 related to a kind 2, or conjoined with a kind 2. The expression a kind 1 conjoined with a kind 2 is an instance of the same general form as that exemplified by the expression cat on a mat. But since this also has the same general form as the expression cat, then so does a k1 or a k2. So this is not a propositional expression of the form x or y. In other words, this is not a relation between objects. A representing of a green square need not comprise anything green or square.
Its structure does not mirror the structure of what it represents. And this feature can be noted by characterizing it as an of a green square representing. Thus the representing of a green square adjoining a red square can be expressed as an of a green square adjoining a red square representing or as a green square adjoining a red square representing. In other words this is Selvius' adverbial account of sensing where sensation doesn't involve a relationship between sensing and sense, where the sense is some kind of object, but rather it's a non-relational representing which can be adverbially characterized through
these kinds of locutions. And the philosophical point being made here is that the representing of complexity is correlated with a complexity of representing via what Sellers calls counterpart relations between representing and represented. But there is no resemblance between the complexity of the representing and the representing of complexity. So this is Sellers' hypothesis. All the possible ways in which conceptual representings of empirical properties and relations can resemble and differ correspond to ways in which what he calls their immediate non-conceptual occasions, i.e. non-conceptual representings of sense, can resemble and differ. So we explain how non-conceptual representings constrain
conceptual representings by postulating a correspondence relation between two distinct systems of resemblances and differences, one conceptual, the other non-conceptual. And Sellers calls the latter sense impressions. Now, this correspondence does not require resemblance relation between items in the two systems. The correspondence is what Sellers calls a second-order isomorphism between non-resembling systems of resemblances and differences. Nor, of course, does it consist of a relation of resemblance between representation and represented. The conceptual system does not represent the non-conceptual system. The correspondent consists in the structural equivalence between properties of relations
among two distinct sets of relations. So, this then provides the framework for analogical theorizing. Just as the characteristics of non-conceptual representings cannot be construed as resembling what is conceptually represented through them, so the characteristics of sense impressions cannot be identified with those of their typical causes. These characteristics must be understood as new theoretical predicates introduced by analogy with those of certain observables. Now, although modeled upon the properties of represented physical observables, the properties of sense impressions are not physical properties or states. So once we reject the claim that the representation of something
is the representation of it as something that it is, and see that all representing of something as something is conceptual, the way is open to viewing the distinction between the observable and the unobservable, which is, let's say, the theoretical, as methodological and not ontological. And postulating theoretical entities to explain conceptually characterized appearances establishes the sought-for analogy at the level of transcendental reflection between observables and postulates on one hand and appearances and things in themselves on the other. Now this, Sellers' arguments, which is the elaboration of Sellers' argument from Double Affection,
allows us to accept Kant's rejection of dogmatic rationalism and skeptical empiricism while avoiding his idealism. Here's another quote from Sellers. Indeed, it is only if Kant distinguishes the radically non-conceptual character of sense from the conceptual character of the synthesis of apprehension and intuition and accordingly the receptivity of sense from the guidedness of intuition that he can avoid the dialectic which leads from Hegel's phenomenology to 19th century idealism. Okay. So.
Okay. Okay. I'll move now to Selger's scientific realism. Okay, so this is a condition for reconciling transcendental logic understood as an account of how non-conceptual reality constrains the structure of its own conceptual representation with naturalism understood as the claim that representings are a part of nature, minimally defined as a spatiotemporal continuum. So Sellers writes, as I see it a consistent scientific realist must hold that the world of everyday experience is a phenomenal world in the Kantian sense existing only as the contents of actual and obtainable conceptual representings. The obtainability of which is explained not as for Kant by things in themselves, known only to God, but by scientific objects about which, barring
catastrophe, we shall know more and more as the years go by. So this realism is an explanatory hypothesis about the obtainability of conceptual representings. It requires a metaphysical postulate, where metaphysical means identifying the proper functioning of categories understood as conceptual summa genera, and when necessary recategorizing phenomena to explain the obtainability of conceptual representings. And the postulate of sense impressions is metaphysical in this sense. They're not micro physical entities but recategorizations of the sensible qualities of macro physical objects. Now, I'll skip over this, you know, distinction
between two senses of physical to get to Celsius naturalism. So Celsius naturalism is not, it's It's not Aristotelian, where nature is a repository of substantial forms. It's not simply methodological, in a sense where methodological naturalism is... where the claim that the bounds of the natural are delimited by the explanatory resources of current science. But nor is it reductive, where every natural phenomenon must be decomposable into its microphysical components. Now, here we get to Brandom's critique of Selger's naturalism. Brandham's claim is that despite his Kantianism, Sellers' scientific realism turns out to be a brand of reductive naturalism, contradicted by the anti-reductive consequences of Sellers' modal expressivism. What is this? This is the thesis that, I won't read out the quote here,
but it's simply the claim that alethic modal concepts like necessity and possibility express express lawful relations between empirical descriptive concepts, such as house, cat, opera, electron. And what they express are the structural framework features conditioning the deployment of empirical concepts. So for random, following sellers, the deployment of any empirical descriptive concept presupposes knowing how to deploy these aletheic modal concepts. Modal vocabulary allows us to say what we are doing when we use descriptive vocabulary. It explains why describing something as A entails describing it as B. Modal assertions provide inference tickets from one empirical characterisation to another. So, to say dogs
are necessarily mammals is to say that one is justified in moving from the claim, this is a dog to this is a mammal. And this is why there's a kind of an intimate connection between describing and explaining. Describing and explaining are distinguishable but inseparable, says Sellers. So that describing and explaining things always goes hand in hand. To explain means to understand the the modal properties or the modal characteristics of any empirical entity. It's part of the condition of being able to properly, you to properly classify or properly describe an entity that we understand its modal features, what it can and cannot do. So, here's what Branham calls the modal Kant-Seller's thesis.
Modal vocabulary renders explicit features that are implicit in the use of ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary. Every empirical descriptive concept has modal consequences. The necessary conditions for its correct application are rendered explicit using subjunctive conditions. For example, the conditions for the correct application of the empirical descriptive concept organism are rendered explicit in subjunctive conditionals such as, if this organism were to ingest a toxic substance, it would be harmed. But these inferences are non-monotonic. They are not robust under arbitrary addition of auxiliary premises. In other words, if the organism has been given an antidote to the poison, it will not be harmed.
Okay, so now we come to... Have I still got five minutes left? Yes. Okay, so what I'll do is I'll simply explain Brandom's critique of Sellers' naturalism, or why he thinks, and then maybe kind of elaborate what is misguided about this critique in the discussion. Okay, so Brandom's argument is as follows. Since descriptive properties, empirical descriptive properties are modally involved, they locate objects in the space of implication. The identification of an object A with another object B requires identifying all of A's empirical descriptive properties with those of B. But this includes modal properties, because all of A's modal properties, i.e. the subjunctive conditionals that are true of it, must be identical with all of B's modal properties, all the subjunctive conditionals that are true of B.
Now among empirical descriptive properties are sortle predicates, lion, house, person, molecule, sortle being any kind of noun which can be counted. You can count lions, houses, persons, molecules, etc. Sortles determine criteria of identity and individuation. Different sortles can have the same criteria of identity and individuation, e.g. the sortles kitten and cat differ in criteria of application but not criteria of identity. All kittens are cats but all cats have been kittens so the kitten then becomes a phase sortle of cats. However there are different sortles such as passenger and person which have distinct criteria of application and
identity. The number of passengers counted by airlines is not the same as the number of persons taking flights. The same person making a round trip flight counts as two different passengers for the airline. If one tallies up passengers in terms of flights, there will be more passengers than persons, even if every passenger in every flight is a person. Identifying person A with passenger one is a strongly cross-sortial identity because it requires identifying all of A's modal properties with all of B's. But if person A had not taken a flight he would not be passenger one but still be person A. So, Brandon concludes, person A and passenger one differ in at least one modal property. So, since manifest object and scientific objects fall under different
descriptive sortles with different criteria of identity and individuation, identifying them would require what Brandom calls strongly cross-sortle identities. But such sortles differ in the non-monotonic subjective conditionals that govern their application, and therefore the identification must fail. Strongly cross-sortle identity claims, says Brandom, are never true. Now, according to Brandom, Sellers' claim is that our everyday descriptions of things, cats, persons, passengers, is explained by postulating non-conceptual complexes of representations. According to Brandom, this explanation requires identifying the properties of conceptually represented contents with those of non-conceptual representings.
Since such identification is impossible, the requirement of explanation is in this instance misguided. It is a symptom of what Brandom calls object naturalism. Object naturalism seeks to locate the truth makers of claims in a target discourse in the world as specified by a favor naturalistic vocabulary, whether physics or some other science. So object naturalism is a naturalism about objects and properties that our vocabulary allows us to think and talk about. By way of contrast, subject naturalism is a pragmatic naturalism that simply wants to capture, to give an account of the discursive practices of using the target vocabulary as meaningful in the way in which it is meaningful.
And this, according to Brandon, requires seeking what he calls a pragmatic meta vocabulary for every target, for every kind of, every vocabulary containing empirical descriptive claims. Okay. So now, okay, I'll just simply summarize the third and final section. Why I think Brandom... Two things. Brandom thinks that the ability to deploy empirical descriptive terms and therefore to master the relevant subjunctive conditionals involves what he calls
systems of pragmatic inference. Pragmatic inference is knowing how to use, knowing what to do to deploy an empirical concepts appropriately. Pragmatic inference is precisely what is captured in what he calls a pragmatic meta vocabulary. The pragmatic meta vocabulary specifies what one is doing, says what one is doing when employing an empirical descriptive vocabulary. But according to Brandom, this is precisely, it's this, the characterization of what one is doing, is precisely what cannot be explained in terms of any kind of discourse that is entirely, you know,
that would objectify what is going on in this doing. So in other words, what Brandom is saying is that pragmatic meta vocabulary explicates a descriptive vocabulary as meaningful in the way in which it is meaningful. And thereby it immunizes and this insistence that a vocabulary can only be explained in its own terms. where any kind of saying can only be explained by rendering explicit what one is doing when one is saying something. This means that pragmatic inference, the practice of pragmatic inference, or the competence involved in pragmatic inference, is immunized against any kind of objectivation,
or any kind of scientific explanation, or any kind of theoretical explanation that simply doesn't explicate the relationship between the competence at the level of description and the competence at the level of categorization. Okay, so my final claim is this, is that... Seller's naturalism is actually not about trying to characterize discursive competences in terms of the object categories proper to the scientific image. It's a claim that in order to understand that our discursive competences are tied to the world through our sensible capacities.
So that all conceptual representing is guided by non-conceptual representing. And the claim is that this relationship, the constraint that the non-conceptual exercises of the conceptual is precisely what philosophy must forge resources that would allow it to be empirically explainable. So, ultimately, the claim is that Sellers' insistence, he misconstrues Sellers as a kind of reductive naturalism, and I think he misunderstands the most important motivation for Sellers' introduction of a metaphysics of pure processes,
which is to forge a category, a conceptual category, that can explain how non-conceptual representings in themselves, together with conceptual representings, are both ingredients in a natural process. And what he calls, since processes are concrete universals, they're a new species of individuals. They are not objects, nor can they be explained in terms of systems of relations amongst objects. So by trying to immunize discursive practice from objectification, what Brandom does is he resorts to a kind of a familiar kind of hermeneutic transcendentalism
where discursive practices, the way in which we understand ourselves and the world, is in a way incorrigible and incorrigible in principle because it cannot be subjected to any external explanatory constraint. Okay, that's it. I'll just stop. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for this presentation and sorry for you to have a little bit precipitated on the end. But I think that two important ideas should be taken, at least in my sense.
The first is that there is an in-soi, the for-soi, it's one of the central themes of the realism that you defend. Maybe it's a materialism, maybe it's a naturalism. These three terms are the same and the question is to ask how they join. but what is characteristic, and it was already true in the book that we call now the Néant Deschainé, it was already true, what is actually a reflection on the soi-soi, it is to say on the reality, on a strata of reality of the experience, inaccessible to the experience, and so it is something I believe you have defended here, in a certain way, in insisting at the end on the character irreductible of the scientific explanation, that is to the access to the source of the source,
to the explicitization herménotic, that is to the simple depliment of the source of the source. So I think that it is clear a lot of the position that is their. So I will pass the word to Anna Longo, who has directed a book, which is released in 2015, which is called Breaking the Span, Discussions on Speculative Realism, who has directed and introduced this book, and who is one of the important figures of the reception and cartography of this debate. And so I will leave now the floor. Thank you. Thank you for this invitation. I will make a short presentation, maybe a long question, a divagation, I hope an overview in all of a sudden.
So I'm going to start with what was said about the philosophy of Selass, and then I'll open to other questions. Selass vise to establish a scientific realism, evitant to fund the representation on the sensitive data, so on the limit of data. So for this art, it is about to know how one knows, that is to say how to establish the relationship between the act of the thought and the object of the thought. And it is to persuade that the difference between the representation obtained by the concept of determination and the thing in itself is analog to the difference between the cause and its effect.
but it is actually a difference in reality, that is to say the difference between a non-conceptual representation and a non-conceptual representation. What we consider as an impression sensible given, from which the intellect operates in accordance with the concept, so representation in the sense of the common, is in reality what we represent conceptually as a sensible. So, we don't talk about a sensible thing in itself. In this way, the problem doesn't consist of knowing if the sensation is caused by something in itself,
which it is represented as being the cause of the representation, because the problems are not posed to a solution. If our representation is a synthesis of the sensitive data according to the law of causality, then we can't make the representation of the effect of a cause. So the problem is formulated by cellars, in this way. How do we get the concept which allows us to produce representation from a non-conceptual representation, which is from an object that we must postulate as what we need to know. So Kant,
Solomon-Dieu, could, by the intuition intellectual, deduce the concept in the matter of the intuition. so to know a priori the totality of the experience possible. However, in the case, this knowledge is not limited to God because in a way, the objects theoretical of science are the things in themselves are considered as things in the sense that they are not conceptually which it is to represent in a conceptually. It would be so to post the object equal to x which constitutes the representer non-conceptual that it is to know in the way of the concept.
The scientific realism of this art would be a hypothesis concerning the genesis or production of the concept representation which requires a metaphysic postulate. This metaphysic concern the possibility of thinking about the total of categories to operate, if necessary, a sort of recatégorization of the sensible, to be able to postulate a new object theory. So it is through the transcendental reflection that we consider first the difference between representation non-conceptual and representation conceptually as a difference between the object theory that it is to know and its representation.
However, it is always by this reflection operation that we postulate the theoretical objects that they have a challenge to represent the concept of representation, which makes possible the definition of the transcendental structure, so the creation of new concepts. Cependant, cela signifie, il nous semble, que les objets théoriques de Célarse ont la même statue des idées de l'intellect infini de Salomon Maïmon. Je vais expliquer pour quelles raisons. So, for us, to concilier the finitude of the subject Kantian with its intention to objectivity, Maimon suppose that what we are using is an application of a form in a matter given,
so an intuition that we should accept as we do, for the intellect infinity is the result of its own activity of production of the material material, production of which the rules are provided by the Entendement. Ainsi, ce que pour nous est une intuition est en réalité la somme des différentiels comme production de l'entendement infini, somme qui est comprise par notre conscience finie comme représentation causée par des choses en soi. Donc ce que pour nous est une représentation occasionnée par un X inconnu est, du point de vue de l'intellect infini, parfaitement déductible à partir des idées. What for the intellect is the feeling, intuition, is given, is actively engendered by the idea of the intellect.
However, from this point of view, we are obligated to consider the genetic principles of representation as fiction. So the transcendental reflection should allow to establish the principles, the ideas of the reason, which legitimate the representation in the right, which is to show the need genetics of the concept of the entendement from the mode of production of reality. But in fact, the reflection only allows us to consider the representation as if it was true. For Maimon, the entendement of the subject Kantian manifestent sa finitude par cette incapacité de démontrer la nécessité du fait de la représentation.
Donc ces limites se manifestent par l'incapacité d'attendre les principes à partir duquel la totalité de l'expérience possible pourrait être déduite plutôt que vérifiée à postérieur et de manière empirique. Autrement dit, selon Maimon Kant justifie la représentation quid facti plutôt que quid juris and this is because the judgments that should be founded the concept of concept are reflexive judgments that will produce no real knowledge. And, if we come back to Selassie, he is aware and is aware that his procedure even cannot guarantee at the end of any success
because the idea as a principle of reflection, c'est-à-dire l'objet théorique que l'on suppose comme déterminant sa propre représentation conceptuelle, a plutôt la fonction d'un principe régulateur que d'un principe absolu, donc d'un véritable principe métaphysique. Seller soutient en effet que la connaissance peut progresser selon des objets théoriques de plus en plus satisfaisants afin d'expliquer la possibilité de la science elle-même, donc un savoir de la nature comme productrice des savoirs. is that we will obtain once we attend the coincidence between the scientific image and the manifest image of the human. However, this knowledge is historical, processual.
So, there is a lot of time to attend this coincidence. It is also that the idea of the coincidence between the scientific image and the manifest image is a regulator, which orientes the scientific research. So we should behave like if the subject of reflection, the human being as a theory, could be the human being which we experience. So the human being is a dou, like Shemaimon, an infinite and, like Shemaimon, a reason for the need for scientific knowledge than a fiction. A principle of reflection that allows at least to support that we have to consider the scientific knowledge as if it was true.
Or, the question is to know if the transcendental reflection, like science of knowledge or knowledge of knowledge, can obtain other things than fiction, than the regulatory idea. In other words, if it is possible to answer the question quid iuris is to exhibit the genetic principles of concepts and of all the material which these forms can be applied, namely all the minds of pensable in accordance with these principles. The question is therefore the following. The judgment reflection at the base of the transcendental transcendental we allow to access something else that in representation
in which the form, depending on the object to which it refers, is judged more or less in a way to a principle supposed unity? Is it transcendental we allow to judge the representation differently than from the aesthetic point of view? Is transcendental we allow to judge the representation differently than how we think of fiction, that is to say by the way that the form is accorded with an idea, a principle of unity supposed. Is it that speculation is not intrinsically esthétique? It may seem bizarre, but the philosopher who started at theorizing the aspect
intrinsically esthétique of the speculation is Fichte. So, already in the concept of the doctrine of science, in addition to naming the aesthetic in the list of philosophical disciplines which are based on the doctrine of science, Fichte refers to the activity of reflection in saying that, I cite, there is no rule for this thing and you can't have it. The human body has several attempts. It is guided first by the feeling of obscure, and we would not have today no concept distant if we had begun to feel obscure what we knew later distinctly. This is the story of the philosophy. And in a note, the same paragraph, he adds, I cite,
they are resulting from that philosophy needs the obscure feeling of what is just or the genius that the poet or the artist. That only has to lie on our mode. The last one needs the sense of beauty, the first one needs the truth. So the philosophy needs an aesthetic sense to orient the imagination in their activity of the representation of activities of the subject known, in accord with an idea, an universal non-advised. The speculation implies, in its own mechanism or process, a phase where the aesthetic of the energy products is fundamental, at least for reasons heuristic reasons. In the end of the doctrine of science,
the last paragraph, on lit, je cite, « Les philosophes devraient avoir un sens esthétique, c'est-à-dire de l'esprit. Il n'est pas pour autant nécessairement poète, écrivain ou orateur, mais l'esprit, par la formation duquel on s'élève au point de vue esthétique, doit également animer les philosophes. Sans cet esprit, on ne parviendra jamais à rien en philosophie. » Fin de citation. L'activité idéale, comme réflexion philosophique, a donc besoin d'esprit, c'est-à-dire d'un certain sentiment obscur shared by the artist and the philosopher. The sentiment that Fichte defines instinct as a pulsion esthétique. This is in the letters of the letter of the spirit in the philosophy. It's the response of Fichte
to the letters of the education esthétique of Schiller. This pulsion esthétique must be distinguished by two of them. The instinct of the knowledge is the one who is interested to produce a adequate representation correspondant à l'objet considéré comme donné, donc c'est ce qui permet la représentation conceptuelle, et l'instance pratique qui vise à la transformation de la chose telle qu'elle doit être, c'est-à-dire à transformer la réalité en accord avec une idée. À ces deux points de vue s'opposent les points de vue esthétiques pour lesquels la représentation est à elle-même son propre but. L'instinct esthétique constitue donc les moyens termes entre l'instinct pratique et l'instinct de connaissance, car il partage avec les premiers la satisfaction dérivant de la production de la représentation,
but they don't interest the conformity between the representation and the object. They share with the instinct practical the way to engage the representation for the absolute activity, but they don't find satisfaction in the effective realization of the object. In this sense, from the point of view aesthetic, the representation has a value for itself. So the aesthetic pleasure is determined by the production of imagination which the form is sent to be accorded with an idea, a principle of reflection. The aesthetic point is the one that allows us to elevate the transcendental point of view. The aesthetic point is the sentiment that guides and orientes the reflection in its research of the universe.
an universel non-donnée, c'est le mouvement qui est propre au jugement réfléchissant de la troisième critique. Or, il nous semble que l'on puisse reconnaître dans la spéculation contemporaine la même motivation à la base de la spéculation de Fichte, c'est-à-dire en réaction contre le scepticisme post-critique soutenant l'équivalence de toute représentation. Cette forme de scepticisme ou relativisme peut être reconduite à Maimon. It doesn't consist of not to doubt the correspondence between reality and representation, but to the possibility of finding representation in the right. It is a skepticism in terms of the criteria of the reality of the system and the concepts, but it does not concern the analogy between representation and representation.
However, it is not that every attempt to fund the representation by reflection, so to respond to skepticism of Maimon, should be aware of the reflection of the judgment. The representation of the activities of the concept of the knowledge, and the knowledge of the knowledge, are free productions of imagination which are connected with the principles of reflection, fiction, which show the power of the brain to be elevated, beyond the limits of the experience, by the genetic conditions of this fiction. Fiction that one cannot be judged that by this obscure feeling of beauty or of real.
Thank you. Thank you very much for what I also understood as a tentative of completing the exposé of Ray in trying to situate the moment speculative in what would otherwise seem to be a realist transcendental. It is to think the thing not just as a principle regulator, but as a position speculative. And I think that the construction that you have proposed from this point of view is extremely clear. I will pass without delay the words to Quentin Meyassou, which I have already presented.
I did not say that he was a conference at Paris 1, which is not a gentil, because it is always going to salute the people who pay us. and so on which we could not do this work. So I do it and thank you for accepting this discussion, reminding that we are already in the same time, of course, because it is 6 hours 23. Okay, I will be able to do it. Thank you, Patrice. My answer is going to be in a question that I would like to ask to Ray, after his very dense exposé regarding the link he does between the tests of CELARS, which he has analyzed and his approach nihilist, as he has exposed in his very beautiful book, Neil Unbound. But I also want to introduce you, Ray, Neil Unbound,
in a way that maybe not will be able to play, because it's too historic, too subjective, but that's how I want to talk about it. What I would like to explain, is that, in fact, your project was fascinated by the technicality, by the lack of the impeccable which he does preuve in detail of the argumentation. He fascinated me because there is in fact the reactivation, maybe even the activation, of a thought of thinking, the nihilism, paradoxically recovered by what the XXe siècle understood sous this term after Nietzsche. Nietzsche was of course an eminent thinker of nihilism, and you know how to tell, but he also, I believe,
alterer par la génialité même de sa ressaisie ce nihilisme et il a recouvert la logique de sa première émergence, plus frustre que celle de Nietzsche mais aussi plus âpre. Alors d'abord, Leonie Ellenbaum, pour faire le lien à ta conférence, c'est évidemment comprendre ton intérêt pour Sellars. C'est constater en effet d'entrée l'importance séminal de ce philosophe quant à la perspective nihiliste qui est la tienne, puisque la première partie de ton livre s'intitule « Détruire l'image manifeste ». Expression qui contient à la fois une référence claire à Selars et une critique tout aussi claire. Tu pars d'emblée du texte fameux « La philosophie et l'image scientifique de l'homme », dans
lequel Selars expose une forme de rivalité entre deux images de l'homme dans le monde. D'une part, je le rappelle, il y a l'image manifeste de l'homme, voyant le monde comme an ensemble of objects for view of propriety sensible, which is distinguished the human being, the person, an image which is not the same of an naive, a theory of the human, that the result of a philosophy that has considerably refined over the centuries the same thing originates. The human being scientific, it, is to do, at the contrary, to dissoud the human being, solidary of the human being manifest. In the human being, all comes to the theory of science, the nature of the nature, formulées en termes de propriétés, de relations et d'interactions entre des particules microphysiques dépourvues de propriétés sensibles.
Mais alors que Sellars entend dégager une intégration stéréoscopique des deux images, tu prends le parti de Paul Churchland, un ancien élève de Sellars, qui entend rejeter radicalement l'image manifeste au profit de l'image scientifique, donc détruire l'image manifeste. if Sellars in fact enjoin the philosophers to resist the temptation of subsumer the image scientific under the image manifest of reducing the science to a phenomenon of the human in the world they don't have an advantage as you remind you to replace the image manifest by the image scientific reason the fact that the image manifest is not only a theory more frustrating than the image scientific but has a value normative
The materialism eliminativist of Churchland, at the same time, is to make a psychology issue of the common sense, the folk psychology, a theory, a theory, and a theory insufficient to regard what the neuroscience is even incompatible with a model, called PVA, Prototype Vector Activation, avancé by Churchland. Or, it's this project to which you adhires in the Elon Bond, but you can't give the means to think rigorously, what Churchland, in your sense, does not do, for reasons complex, which are especially in his naturalism, in his metaphysics too poor. It is therefore to conquer a speculative realist, which is a lack of a model PVA, that you employ all your forces, to the text mainly from the traditional philosophy continentals,
that you mobilize and critique as well, Adorno, Horkheimer, my own book, Badiou, La Ruelle, Deleuze, Heidegger, etc. I would say that there is no one to you, to my knowledge, to make me find not only an interest but a charm to a project that I never had. It is that at your time, it is not by ignorance, as it is often the case, of the philosophy philosophy, particularly non-analytical, but in the context of his study, deep. And it is why you are in my sense, in fact, with a figure of nihilism which we are not used to be used in any case in terms of philosophy continental. It is the figure, I would say, originale of a nihilist, which is not the first nomination as a result, which is not the Jacobi.
It is the one who is imposed decisively in the 19th century, namely the student Bazarov, the novel of Turgenev, Père et Fils. It is Turgenev who popularizes this term through this person who is a doctor, who spends a good part of his time to do experiments on the genouilles and who says, I'm going to nier. My brain is so done, and here's everything. This figure of nihilism is historically liable to what we call the materialism chemically and that Engels, for a reason on which I will come back, calls it pejoratively the materialism vulgar. For example, one of the authors of the materialism vulgar, Ludwig Böchner, a été lu dans la Nouvelle de Tourgeniev par Bazarov. Et ce matérialisme-là sera profondément rejeté par la philosophie du XXe siècle.
Alors Bazarov, de fait, qui est-il ? Il fait partie de la deuxième génération des révolutionnaires russes. C'est-à-dire que c'est la génération qui ne lit plus Hegel, comme le faisait encore Bakonin, mais qui lit les matérialistes chimiques. Ces matérialistes, ils ont introduit ou instruit à partir des années 1850 une profonde déconsidération de l'idéalisme allemand. It's them in reality who have destroyed the idealism in the mind of the 19th century. It's even who have put in crisis the whole philosophy in the second half of the 19th century. The Marxism is to do the same with a rehabilitation of the dialectic in the materialism. And that's why, precisely, the chemical materialism becomes, for Engels, the materialism that is vulgar, that is to say non-dialectic. And of course, we know the success of the Marxism when we believe that it is the success of the materialism against the idealism.
No, it's the success of a materialistic which allows again to make of the dialectic, while the dialectic had been, at the contrary, radically disqualified by the first materialistic. A book of Leo Freuler shows in a very interesting way for which the nihilism of Bazarov is becoming incomprehensible, to be a-t-in-the-sit-of-the-sit-of-the-sit. Freuler, in his book on the crisis of the philosophy of the 19th century, part of the book of Carl Leavitt of Hegel and Nietzsche. In this book, Levitt soutient that the second half of the XIX century was dominated by the rejection, the rejection, the rejection of Hegel by Kierkegaard, Marx and Nietzsche. Or, this perspective is actually in the XX century. The XIX century was not viewed as well.
He was not periodized and thoughted as such as the simple reason that the XIX century did not know or not these three thinkers who were almost almost in the XIX century. It is the XX century precisely which he is reported as major. The XIX century, he thought the crisis of philosophy from its disqualification by the materialism chimics, which the representatives, they were fabulously famous in this century. The simple fact that we reconstruct generally the XIXth century as the Levite is to demonstrate the forget of this materialism and by the way, the nihilism which was processed was under a literary figure which popularized it. The materialism and the nihilism is accepted in the XXth century but once repensated against its previous figure,
against the figure that was honorated the XIXth century, for the dialectic by Marx or for the nihilism articulated to the death of God, for Nietzsche. Once largely disqualified the nihilism of Tibazarov, the nihilism, which seems to have penetrated sous an aspect presentable the XXe siècle, is in fact the one that Nietzsche has associated intimement to another tradition of the XIXe siècle, this time of protestation fundamental against the science of the human, against the spirit of the lumière, against the materialism French, to say the tradition, as I said, of the death of God, issue, sous the form she took in the 19th century, of the romantic poesies Byron, Novalis, then the generation of the French poesies of 1830, Nerval, Gautier, Musset.
The nihilism is then accepted that as a sombre diagnostic ported on the time and not as a tranquil vindication of anointing of the traditional values. Even if Nietzsche, Heidegger and even more Vatimo insistent on the importance of the endurer as an epoch decisive of the pensée. But the death of God is in truth a term originally Christian. Saint Paul, in the first epitre of Corinthian, writes that every time you eat this pain and eat this cup, you announce the death of the Lord until he comes. The death of God is generally the anniversary of his resurrection or the resurrection of a new new. And the nihilism associated will be the same. Dionysos for Nietzsche, the last of God for Heidegger, the weak of Vatimou. the nihilism separated from the death of God,
not linked to the death of Nietzsche, is he is he is radicalized, to reprendre the expression of Jonathan Israel, cité with favor by Ray Brassier. It is the line of materialism French, materialism chimics, second generation of revolutionaries. And what is absolutely singular at Ray Brassier, is that it is a Bazarov who would not have simply the wrong literature materialist of his time, but has been written and controlled the most profound and rich philosophy, y compris la plus hostile à son projet. Le nihilisme est décanté du thème de la mort de Dieu et rendu à une pensée dont les intérêts sont différenciés de ceux de la vie. Une pensée qui fait même chez Ray de la fin du monde, de l'extinction future de notre espèce ou de notre soleil, tel qu'imaginé par Nietzsche ou Lyotard, comme un transcendental de la philosophie,
capable de saisir le vivant comme un moment de l'inerte, à la façon de la pulsion de mort de Freud, au fond pour Ray, indissociable de la pulsion de connaître. And for the nihilist, the knowledge and the pulsion of death, it's good. So the nihilist is the one who, in sum, with Ray Brassier, knows that there is nothing more difficult for the thought than to think what there is when there is no thought, than to think our own anointment. It's not the figure of the nihilist presentable who chante sombrement the oublie of the being and the death of God, it's the figure of the nihilist impresentable who dissected with excitement the batracian, but is become this time instrui that his desire to know being associated with Thanatos is separated from her most hard and that the only way
the traversal of the most rich philosophy will allow her to confront her. Now I will return to your conference and I will ask you a question very simple to which I was catastrophized to hear that you had already answered but maybe not entirely. In fact, what I'm going to do is that in Neil and Bound Selars, in the general economy of your argument, the limineer plus que fundamental. He is there at the beginning and he never reappears more. I've verified even in the index of the names. What I mean is that in the first auteur that you study, it's the one who opens your reflection, but it's also the one who is the one who is rather refuted, recused, at the profit of Churchland. And in reading your conference, I have the impression that something, in fact, about Annie Ellenbund would be moved deeply. Because
in your book, Sellars is not a jalon de la reflection, ce n'est pas un des moments par lesquels tu progresses, c'est celui dont tu pars et que tu abandonnes le premier. Et je me suis demandé, en te lisant, si ce n'était pas lié, ce retour à Sellars beaucoup plus approfondi que dans Neil and Bound, au fait que Sellars est un penseur, en effet, de la chose en soi, et qu'il la pense au-delà de Kant. Alors là, il y a un point, en effet, assez fascinant. Je crois, en effet, que ce qui est fascinant chez Hume et chez Kant, c'est que j'y vois les prémices d'un possible the nihilism. Why? Because Hume and Kant will face a paradoxical problem. There will be a silence in these two philosophies empiric and transcendental. This silence silence is not a crisis of knowledge, it is a crisis of ignorance. It seems that neither Hume nor
Kant are really able to ignore what they pretend to ignore. Or it is fundamental for the scepticist and transcendental to affirm that there is something that we ignore, that there is an incontentable. The sceptic, by definition, is sceptic because he pretends that we can't even know everything at the end of the reason. But in this case, it is necessary to affirm that there is something in the outside of our perception that we don't know. And yet, Jung doesn't realize clearly that there is something in the outside of our perception. Because he reduces all our knowledge at the theory of ideas which doesn't necessarily allow to surpass the sphere of ideas and perceptions. So he doesn't realize that there is something that we can't perceive. He can't say that there is a domain that we are so sceptical and not that we are so sceptical and not that we are so idealist absolus who know, in the perception, all that we have to know.
And it's this problem that confront Kant with the thing in itself, because Kant seems to affirm that the thing in itself is the cause of our representation, but by there excède, he-même, if it's well his affirmation, sans compter interdit on the causality, on the category of causality, of the causality, which should not be able to pass the sphere of the phenomenon. It is what he opposed Jacobi, showing that Kant does not have the means to affirm that there is something else in the outside of the transcendental subject, and that he should then be able to go into an egoist absolu, as we said then. So Kant and Jung don't have all the means of their ignorance, which prepares, in somme, the resolution hegelian, it is to absorb everything in the absolute of the subject of the speculative. But there was a tendency to put, beyond the correlation, this power of the almost incognizable of the inertness, which ensures the possibility of the effondrement of the subject in what is not him.
And I think that your analysis of Sellars is in a way of thinking of thinking differently about the thing in itself, precisely by the way of this analysis of the analogy, which would allow for you to think the end of the world. Because the end of the world, in your case, is absolutely decisive, in any case if it's always the case, like in Neil and Bound. Every time there is a result at Paris, I feel like your disciples prolifer, because I see it everywhere, all of them go to disappear and I can't think precisely what you write. And I have the impression that you arrive, fascinating to put in relation what is a lot of a bit of a bit of a philosophy, in any case it was still the case it was a few years ago,
the thing of the end of the world, which is given by Nietzsche and by Lyotard as a condition of the thought. That's my question, a little developed. Thank you. and the real in terms of representation,
not exactly in the sense of Selars, but as if the problem was the real as to what there is to think. I said there is another way of thinking, which is the real as to what makes think, what makes us think, as to the cause of a certain way, and it was the opposite that Deleuze between a philosophy of representation and a philosophy called the expression, probably the term is not very correct, perhaps we could say of the production. So I think that you see here that something fundamental in the realism is precisely at this level. And there is a very long story of this, you are coming on, Salomon Maimon, etc. and who goes to the book of Foucault, which, in some ways,
is the story of this problem, which is, in the way the representative inhabiting the causal system of what he produces himself. And what does to represent what we make to be represented? So I think that the debate has taken this tour. And Ray, do you want to respond to this question, finally, of the relationship between your nihilism and your scellarsism renouveled. Okay, I'll try. Yes, what motivated this interest in nihilism then and now is, you know, that's actually, the idea is that actually nihilism is liberating, okay, it is empowering, it
cognitively empowering. It's not to be seen as something which is a terrible kind of affliction. I wanted to convert the wound into its own kind of healing. The Hegelian kind of reference that the one that Zizek always uses, that the wound wound is healed by the spear that inflicts the wound. And so that nihilism is not the negation of truth, but the truth of negation. And it's thinking the truth of negation, the negation of an established regime of sense. This is the point. The problem is that, in a way,
the standard conception of nihilism of nihilism that I was trying to criticize is the claim that nihilism is some kind of the evacuation of meaning from the world and its kind of reduction to a kind of purely instrumental rationality or presence at hand for Heidegger. So that the antidote to nihilism is recovering a more originary or primordial dimension of sense. That there is a kind of a non-propositional sense, a sense which cannot be propositionally encapsulated and which conditions all propositional representation. And I want to say that nihilism is the dissolution of a regime of propositional sense,
but also of the attempts to ground propositional sense in some subrepresentational or primordial stratum of experience, the primordial phenomenon of being in the world or of whatever one wants to call it. So is that always something that interests you? Yes. Is it a position you want to defend? Yes. Yes, it's always a position that interests me. Sorry, you can speak English. Sellers' whole project is about the transformation of conditions of intelligibility. This is why I find him an inspiring philosopher,
because he's a philosopher who's committed to the project. Sellers' account of meaning shows how meaning itself is a self-correcting enterprise, So that the boundary, the bounds of sense, what Kant called the bounds of sense, can themselves be transformed. But the transformation of sense is not some kind of epical, due to the epical advent of being, you know, being kind of, you know, disclosing and withholding itself at time, but it's something that human beings can take charge of. Something that human beings can, once they understand the conditions for the production of sense, They can seize the conditions of semantic production and change the conditions under which they make sense of themselves and their world.
So I think there is a straightforwardly kind of Marxian strain in cells. He read Marx as a young man, and his writings are peppered with references to Marx. And this is what I find inspiring about him. is instead of trying to defend the, you know, instead of trying to protect some kind of sacrosanct domain of sense from the incursions of positivistic reduction or naturalization, you realize that the generation of sense is something that we can acknowledge and we can somehow govern. Now, the theme of taking, governing or kind of coordinating semantic production is obviously, this is what makes Sellers an Enlightenment thinker.
He's still an heir of the Enlightenment. And this is the one, I think, the question that interests me most, if Sellers has a limitation, is that he doesn't really have, I think, I think he has an impoverished account of the subject. because the subject for Sellers is still too Kantian. And I think what I'm interested in doing after this work on Sellers is understanding how a Hegelian, the Hegelian thinking of subjectivity in a way allows one to actually fulfill
what remains a promise in Sellers or what remains a regulative ideal in Sellers, which is to say thinking the truth of negation as something that is productive and this is obviously what determinant negation is in Hegel. So yes, I don't know if that's... I think I've tried to answer the question and yes, this would be my response to Quentin's question. D'accord, je pense qu'on y reste quand même. Est-ce qu'on peut déborder un petit quart d'heure? 19h15, it was planned. The problem with you is that we can't have contact with the pure dehors. Everything is already anticipated in the implicit concept. Everything was already planned. So we're going to turn on the microphone and
let some questions be posed. Thank you. Yes, it's a question for Ray. I was very interested in your presentation and especially the conclusion you gave when you answered the question of Kant Ami Yessou. You said that you are looking for the truth of the negative and that the outcome of that would be finding a layer of experience which is pre-conceptual or pre-formal.
And you know, perhaps, that there is a whole tradition of thought in India that is called Madhyamaka Prasankhika, very precisely, namely the middle way, Madhyamaka, and Prasankhika means precisely refutation, negation. and the aim apparently of this exercise of negation of thesis, of views is to free the mind from all these conceptual projections and finding a layer of preconceptual experience or at least allowing people to be free in order to get and to reach this layer of preconceptual experience.
Do you relate what you call your nihilism and this kind of technique of systematic refutation of views for the sake of finding the layer of preconceptual experience? I'm sorry. Actually, I think I didn't make myself clear enough. It's actually, I don't believe there is any layer of preconceptual experience. That's the whole, in fact, the point is to say there is not to try to kind of recover this originary domain or stratum of preconceptual experience and to protect it from conceptualization. I want conceptualization. I want more conceptualization. So, and it's, in a way, it's, but...
Yes, but you did say that there is something non-conceptual in the very schematisation or categorisation of the world. So it's not a layer that we should recover. Except that Seller's whole point is that you forge, you create a concept of the non-conceptual. That's what a sense impression is. He's saying there are non-conceptual representings, but they can be conceptualised. And the task is to conceptualise them so as to integrate the non-conceptual conditions of conceptualisation. This is his Hegelian, this kind of quasi-Hegelian strand. But I take the reference very positively, and I'm sympathetic to this account of these practices of negation, but I think they're not sufficient.
They're one-sided. Once you've negated, and this is, I think, the great lesson of Hegel, you can't have an abstract negation. there must be a negation of the negation and I think that determinate negation in Hegel has been caricatured and I think it's something I want to reaffirm Thank you something I find astonishing about your work is that you're very passionate about what you do, or manifestly passionate, and it's ironic that your work is grounded in this nihilism,
but it's extremely optimistic somehow about this project, and kind of the idea of revitalizing the Enlightenment project and trying to, you know, this Promethean kind of perspective. and I just keep, you know, I don't personally share that kind of optimism and I just wonder where that comes from and what motivates it, is it about reducing existential risk as some people talk about in the sense of leotard or... No, it's the claim, well, what is positive about nihilism is the realisation that you have nothing to lose. There's nothing to lose. So what is it you're frightened of? once you realize you have nothing to lose
there's no reason to be frightened and therefore this claim that another end of the world is possible, yes another end of the world is possible one that we can generate so that a complete a complete categorical transformation in the resources of sense and the way in which we understand ourselves and everything so instead of in a way it's a kind of I understand the appeal of the messianic ideal. But I think it's too optimistic. It's too optimistic because it supposes that you have the resources to endure annihilation. Whereas I think the point is that if you can contribute to the determination of annihilation, something else might happen. Some radical
transformation might happen. And it seems to me that that's a risk worth taking. So the point is instead of like, you know, what Hegel says, thinking is tarrying with the negative. It's not being frightened of abstraction and negation, but actually marshalling them through what he calls this universal formative activity, understanding how it's through the concept that we have the resources to remake ourselves and the world. Nothing else will do it for us. This is why the resource of passivity, of giving up the resources of conceptualization and making do, trying to kind of hope for some kind of a return to a kind of an accommodation
with existence. No, there is no accommodation with existence. There is no possible equilibrium. I mean the whole idea that we can rediscover, re-establish an equilibrium with the world is, I think, that's pessimistic. That's a... Because it still thinks we have something to lose. Just avant de prendre une autre question, j'aimerais bien peut-être que Quentin, quand même, tu nous expliques ce que tu as dit au passage in saying that this nihilism was completely strange, that it was something that you didn't know about it, but that you found some charm. Because there is still a dimension of the for-tien in your way, the dimension of the negation,
like that, the rien is very present. So, rien, it's nihil. Oui, but... Can you take the microphone? I don't know. Can you share it? It's to say that I've tried to take the things historically, to try to because when I read the first time the book of Ray, I had the impression that it was a missile that came from null part, I didn't get to see where you came from. And I had so to do the genealogy in a way of your advenues, which was masked by the fact that, again once again, for me, the nihilism, it was Heidegger, it was Vatimo who was far away from you, who was a nihilist, so that we can't think of two thinkers more away from you and Vatimo, who is for the thought of fab, the herménotic, the Catholic of his childhood, so it was really very far from all that you could support.
I think you made implicitly allusion in the preface, but for all the time, and I was wondering how can these nihilists be able to tell, while they are also opposed. And in fact, what I understood, what I understood is that the tradition who was occult, the one who comes from the radicals, the one who comes from the French, the materialism that comes from the materialism, which is the one who has really taken out radical the idealism of the allemand, not Feuerbach, not Marx, etc. For the 19th century, it's them. It's the foundation on which Marx thinks like Nietzsche. If we don't understand what they are in there, we don't understand them. And when they brought them into the 20th century, we have no idea at all this dimension in which they think.
and if I'm a little bit away it's just because because of any other philosophy continent I'm issue of a tradition who thinks through Marx, through Nietzsche, through Heidegger and who thinks when you talk, when you explain you might have the impression that you come from the tradition which has continued this materialism chimic, vulgar or I don't know what it's to say the logic of the positivism, for which the metaphysics doesn't have any sense, but you do the metaphysics Sauf que toi, tu t'empare des lectures de philosophes continentaux, même que les philosophes continentaux ne lisent pas comme Laruel, et tu le montres... Parce que tu aimes bien défendre les méchants, ceux qui ont mauvaise réputation. Je pense que ça tu aimes bien. Donc tu prends de Churchland, tu prends Laruel, là tu te dis, là personne ne va être d'accord avec moi, je suis sûr de mon coup.
Et donc... J'ai rien à perdre. Voilà, j'ai rien à perdre, donc j'y vais. Et en fait je me suis dit, mais en fait il arrive pour la première fois to make this nihilism who disappeared in giving all his power philosophically in showing that this project Frust who was led by people who didn't know anything about philosophy was the most difficult to men and the most interesting it's there that's the most difficult it's what's the most difficult to repere it's not difficult to say I'm going to the desert where nothing has been thought it's more difficult to hanter the terrain vague where it's totally dérize désuet périmé no one can etc and to see that under a box of conserve there is an incredible thing. In fact, it's this tradition that has been completely blacklisted and which is not at all the logic of the positivism logic,
that you have put in a little bit in a way of doing it in a way of doing it on a way of doing it on a way of doing it on a way of doing it. And I, what I've seen from your ethos, again, I can't be mistaken because I told Patrice that you could have been re-need Neil and Bond because the nihilist is not. But in fact, no, you maintain the nihilism. The ethos that I see in you, which I fascine, is that in you, there is a conscience that the fear of knowing will be paired with the pulsion of death. In a way, the accusation that we have to make of the Lumiere, that his rationality, his desire to know was mortified because it was a technique, you can't say, yes, it's true, the pulsion of death is the fear of knowing, so the pulsion of death, it gives us precisely the passion to know.
it's Bazarov with his grenoilles and it's what you do in your book because you dissac the other because I was talking about but when you read it with an incredible intensity with an incredible precision and then you can't break it I know it's the interior because I was the object you can't break it completely you're a sort of material very hard which allows you to reinforce your intellectual before you're the following and that's what makes you always but in the same time, always extremely engaged and intense in the most apparently abstract knowledge. Because in fact, the nihilist vit totally for, in a way, the exercise of what in the thought is actually pulsing of death, but in the same time pulsing. I don't understand what you completely distinguish from this point of view.
The inversion of a negative affirmation absolue, it's also something that is at the heart of your gesture. Yes, but I'm not a reductionist. Because I'm here to be a dialectic. So, there's another thing completely enterré. But it's not the same. And so, in fact, in the dialectic, you have an element who resist to the reduction. You have what you call the appearance, the qualia. For me, the absurdity is like that the manifest is true. It's the point of the absurdity of the world that the manifest is true. But that, I think it's something that we, in fact, distinguish. But I think that what is the only philosopher who makes the pulsion of death joyeuse.
In addition, it's a fable. You remember that it's a fable for Freud himself, it's a sort of fable circulative. And it's to say that, as the platonician, his mythes, his fables, are some of the immortalism of the soul, and the judgment of the last, the fables, the Nietzsche, the Lyotard, the Freud, are some of the fables on the end of the world. where he goes to his own argumentative, and where he puts his own stories. And these stories are actually made in the way that the knowledge is always a bit the end of the world. And in the meantime, I'll conclude here on the other, that it is clear on our own way of thinking, because at the end, the universities, the philosophers who have to refuse in permanence the rivaux, the other philosophers who are even diplomatically treated as imbéciles, etc. So there is already in our practice this pulsion of Marx.
What is sain for Ray is that he is the representative ascetic. I think there is a material materialist continental which is actually issue of Marxism but which makes a causality of the void or a causality of the man. It's called Althusser. La Ruelle was a direct heir. Ray seems to continue, but I close this little remark. You will be all structuralist in any way. Well, we have another question. Yeah, thanks, Ray. I think I have a question of comprehension because somehow I took you at one point to say that there is something like a non-relation between the representation and what is represented. there is no one cannot
you even said that there are non-related layers and one could read this referring to the Lacanian there is no relation between the two of them, one could in this sense say there is no relation between the conceptual and the natural so to speak and then certain moves that you make perfect sense but I got a little confused and I think it was the random detour because there you seem to suggest that what process naturalism is, is a mediation between the two somehow. And that's weird because then it sounds as if, I mean, you made your case with regard to Brandon because Brandon seems to suggest in this hermeneutical pragmatism,
there is of course a relation between the concept and nature or spirit and nature. It's historical practice, right? I mean, and that's transcendental. so he's a Habermasian ultimately but I thought your point about Seller's first was to emphasize the non-relation and then one could make a different kind of step I think to Hegel and just like last remark, one of the first pupils of Kant, Carl Christian Erhard Schmidt, coined a wonderful term for the non-relation between the two of them, he called it intelligible fatalism It's wonderful, got him into a lot of trouble with Fichte. Okay, thanks. Yes, so both thinking and sensing are non-relational for sellers.
So in other words, there is no... For sellers, it's a mistake to think... This is why this is not a kind of metaphysical representation. It's a mistake to think that, for instance, thoughts represent states of affairs, that there's a relation between, you know, thinking and some kind of objective state of affairs to which it corresponds. So thinking is an activity, it's a doing, as is sensing. Neither of them have objects, neither of them have object correlates, and neither of them, Now, they're articulated, but you don't have a conceptual representation of the non-conceptual conditioning of conceptual representation.
So then your question about, given this, if the process, if the resort to the process again is an attempt to encompass them both, to relate them, Yes, that would be, in a way, that is, it would be part of the synoptic or stereoscopic fusion of the images, which Sellers thinks is necessary. However, this is where I think there's an ambiguity in Sellers. On the one hand, the point is that processes are necessarily kind of, they're going to be multiple. and the conditions we don't have criteria of individuation for them.
So the claim is not that somehow that you could... The claim is not that you're going to be able to reintegrate thinking and sensing or the conceptual and non-conceptual within this new kind of meta-category. In other words, this would be a spinicist move. You don't reduce... You don't just have a single substance of which thinking and sensing then would be kind of dual attributes. No. Although he can be read in this way, but that's the reading I would like to resist. Because processes are not... There's still going to be a distinction between thinking, conceptualization, and process phenomena.
So in other words, you can't simply kind of identify concepts with processes. And here, ultimately, I think the temptation with Sellers is, even though his account of what this stereoscopic integration would be, it has to be an integration without fusion. Even though there's a famous book called Fusing the Images by Jay Rosenberg. But I don't think that the synoptic vision is a fusion. That would reinstate the kind of monism that I think that sellers cannot accept. But this is a point, you know, he doesn't say much about this stuff. But then I think this is where Hegel has to be brought in.
There are two last questions and then we'll have to leave the room. I have an idealist-minded question about the status of thought in metaphysical terms. You outlined a framework in which thought is, and the difference between sensing and knowing is articulated in terms that you say explicitly are not ontological, that they are formal, which and I think this is an epistemological grounding on which the question for me would be does that preclude a further metaphysical inquiry and if so what is the status of thought of thinking
as what kind of processes is it how is it to be integrated you were talking about integration without fusion? And what kind of theory of thinking and the idea does that may imply? Okay. Okay, this is, yes, this is a tricky question. So once, as I said in response to Frank's question, for sellers it's a mistake to try to reify or hypothesize thinking, as if it was some, as if once you have given an account of the furniture of the world, you then have to kind of figure out, you know, what thoughts are. Thoughts are functions. Concepts are functions. And they are functions, you know, executed on the basis of discursive
practices. So thinking is something we do, but this doing need not be reified. You know, Certainly not reified as an attribute of some underlying substance. But then what Sellers wants to avoid is a kind of a dualism of the normative and the natural, of thinking as rule-governed discursive practice on the one hand, and nature as anything that can be causally articulated or described and explained. and you know he so thinking involves you know the normative dimension of thinking is involves activities that simply can't be reduced
to describing and explaining and these kinds of activities have a social they can only be kind of made sense of in a social context now I think what Sellers needs to do is that he needs to be able He can't make the Brandomian move, which is a kind of, if not a kind of a Habermasianism, a kind of Fichtianism. I think Terry Pinkard described Brandom ultimately as a Fichtian, because the ought, the kind of self-positing normative practice, can't be, is this kind of a structure of self-relation which can't be grounded in anything more fundamental.
But then the, so Sellers has to avoid this kind of, you know, transcendental sociologism where discursive practices are completely autonomous unto themselves and a monism on the other hand or a Schillingianism where you would kind of have thinking as a kind of, you know, as a power, you know, a calculation of a power of nature. And I think he's aware of the problem, and so certainly, but he doesn't want processes to kind of to bridge the gap. But he wants processes to demystify practical activity. So in other words, he wants processes to demystify the doings that are involved in saying.
But this is the limitation. I think this is the limit of his project, where he didn't have time to go beyond this. But look, it's just that rules, you know, it's like if you've given an account of, you know, what exists, you know, you don't have to somehow kind of find a way to, you don't naturalize the normative by adding it to the furniture of the world. So that, you know, if you think about what is the ontological status of the rules of a game, the rules of chess? Well, Brandom's point is that that's a silly, that's a badly formulated question. they're not things. What we do when we play a game is we engage in a practice, a practice that can be described and explained,
but what is going on in the practice itself, its intrinsic normative or prescriptive component, is precisely what can't be described and explained at the level of what is going on in nature. I just wanted to make sure that the question you asked, that is to say, at which moment we need to pass to the metaphysics, or to do the saut in the ontology, as it was called Deleuze, or in fact in the speculation, to make a speculative use of the concept for precisely thinking about this determination of the experience, by something that is not at all, it was the question that Analongo wanted to treat. It was on this point, that is the moment where the function of the speculative speculative is from a Fichte,
which is not the fact that is not the fact, but the Fichte is the fact that is the sensible. It is because the philosophers have an experience, which is not radically non-conceptual, but have elements non-conceptuals, if you have understood, the elements sensible, that they can also do this work. So these are questions, I don't know if you want to intervene, Anna, on this point, because it was all the point of your exposé to resitue the speculative moment in this configuration. Yes, it was just that, if we search the genetic conditions of the transcendental system, the system of the concept, concepts, we can't use the concepts.
So we need a rational system to have the concepts of objects. We can't do the concepts of objects because if we transform the concepts into objects, we have a rule of infinity. So there is a contradiction. And so it's why I talked about this sort of activity which has no rules. And it's an activity that has no rules, which should be oriented by something. The thing that orientes this activity is what Kant calls the idea of reason, which are the principles of reflection that we find in the third critique. It's universal that we seek to reunify the divers, in this sense, the divers of the representation. But this universal that we seek to reunify
is not something that is given. It's something that we need to seek. So it's about searching a concept that can unify a divers. But the research of this concept and something that must be conducted by an activity which is not an activity conceptually, but an activity of the reflection itself. The problem is that I believe that once we put this idea of the reflection as a principle that is able to fund the representation, we do everything in the bottom. In the sense that it is this idea that is the thing in itself, not because it is the thing that I must represent outside, but because
it is the genetic condition of all the structures. So it's why I said that in the arts, there is a sort of circle which is a little bit the circle that we find once we have the fiction and this intellect that is from the idea to produce the matter of our own intuition. And this matter of intuition is the theory postulé par la science, qui est postulé, mais postulé comme idée, mais après il fait le tour par-dessous et devient la représentation non-conceptuelle qui doit faire l'objet de la représentation conceptuelle. Yes, absolutely, yes, absolutely. And I think that this, so Sellers wants this to be, he's fully aware, I mean, the circle is there in his account of transcendental logic. He thinks it can be virtuous, but I completely agree that what,
really this is the limitation I think the question that is really interesting is where Hegel obviously must enter because I think that obviously Hegel says that the condition reason you can't simply there's a point at which one if reason remains a regulative ideal then this you've got a kind of a bad infinity and you've got, sellers cannot avoid idealism you can't avoid the kind of idealism the kind of transcendental idealism
that he is hoping to detach himself from so I think that this is where the Hegelian critique of transcendental philosophy is decisive it's fiction Yes, I just have a very quick naive question for Ray Brassier. I'm here. You said at the end that nihilism is liberating because you say if nihilism is true, then we have nothing to lose. and I agree that this conditional is true. However, I have a little problem. So I'm very sympathetic to nihilism. I think that it's almost certain that nihilism is true.
However, I cannot infer that I have nothing to lose because I still have the idea that maybe, like there is a 5% or 1% chance that nihilism is false. And so when I try to know if I have something to lose or nothing to lose, I have to compute not only the fact that if nihilism is true, then I have nothing to lose, but I have also to take into account my degree of belief in nihilism. So I make the multiplication and I end up thinking, oh, but I still have something to lose, like a very small thing. You understand what I mean? So I wanted to know, are you certain that nihilism is true? Or do you think there is a way out to say that, no, we really have nothing to lose, even though nihilism is not certainly true? This is a yes or no question. I don't believe it to be true
because I don't think it's something that is commensurate with belief Nietzsche already saw this how can you believe that everything you believe is false there is no such belief this is kind of the paradox the only way in which you can overcome it then is through this affirmation where you give up believing because you suspend the distinction between true and false belief So you can't believe that nothing is true. This is something that's not possible to believe. This is why it's a mistake to formulate the issue of nihilism in terms of believing or desiring. And this is where I think part of the critique, the rejection of folk psychology, is useful.
The point is nihilism is not something to be believed in, nor is it something to be desired. It's something that requires a conceptual discipline, a discipline of conceptualization which obliges you to rethink the basis in terms of which you believe or desire anything. Très bien, merci. On va laisser donc maintenant les organisateurs du colloque peut-être conclure. Non, ça va être extrêmement rapide. C'est justement pour ne pas conclure, pour ne pas faire de synthèse, tout simplement vous dire que ces journées ont évidemment été extrêmement riches et je pense qu'on a tous besoin de revenir dessus et on va avoir la possibilité of coming back to what was said and what was done thanks to the extraordinary work of Thomas Chopler who was always there in the back of the building to make this colloque
registrable, archivable, so we all got to find archive, and so in this sense perhaps that Edouard and the Amazonian were right, all that was perhaps not entirely for nothing thank you all, thank you all and then a great evening to you all.